Blogger decided it didn’t want to stay up during our hackaton. I’m not sure why but Blogger seems to be having a lot of issues lately. Anyhow, that didn’t keep us from finishing an initial site design, get some code written and get our new intra web server almost fully configured before we had to wrap up. Pretty good progress all in all!

So these passed week both Alex and I have been busy with other stuff, so we haven’t had much time to work on the development for our yet to be announced super-duper-product. However, this weekend we have planned to get together for a ‘hackaton.’ For you guys not familiar with hackatons, it is something that fairly common in Silicon Valley among both start-ups and established companies. A hackaton something of a team-event where you get all your staff together (for us, that means me and Alex), and code/work for 24 hours or so straight to solve a common (or team-based) goal. Often these event are filled with plenty of fast-food and caffeine, and are usually appreciated in the geek-world.

Our event will of course only involve me and Alex, but we hope to be able to make some major progress in our development. We will keep you updated when we start our hackaton, and see how much of what we accomplished we will reveal. We’re still in stealth-mode, so don’t expect us to reveal much though.

We’ve been at this for about a year already so we have seen our share of problems with our business plan. It seems like every other day some new competitor shows up. They still don’t do what we plan to do but like with artillery shells it doesn’t feel good when they start hitting close. So yesterday I went back to basics and started doing the math and predictions. If we make this much money per amount of resource we pay for, are we doing alright? That’s the question.

The other day’s post mentioned the importance of being able to refocus when the inevitable downturn comes. I think we had a bit of downturn yesterday but we’ll refocus and come right back up.

Today I found an article that really caught my attention. The article was written by Paul Graham, a startup-guru(?) who has been around for while, and pretty much knows what he’s talking about.
Anyhow, this article was called the 18 mistakes that kills a startup. So, since we’re a startup, I thought that I’d analyze his list a bit, to see how we’re doing.

• Single Founder
• Check. Last time I counted we were two at least.

• Bad Location
• No way. We’re located at the best possible location.

• Marginal Niche
• Not really, our potential is certainly not a ‘Marginal Niche’.

• Derivative Idea
• Our idea is great. It’s simple, and yet powerful. However, most importantly, I want our product. It’s something that I would use on a daily basis.

• Obstinacy
• I don’t think this will be a problem. We’re certainly flexible, but we still know what we want. Also, customer feedback is definitely something that will be used in the future to determine where we’re going with our products.

• Hiring Bad Programmers
• Not gonna happen. Alex is an awesome programmer, and he’ll code just about any language you can imagine, and he’ll do it good. It’s hard for me to imagine that he would hire a bad programmer.

• Choosing the Wrong Platform
• Not at all. No money will be wasted on expensive licenses. All the money will be placed right into the R&D-account.

• Slowness in Launching
• I don’t think this will be a problem either. We’re trying to launch our product as soon as we think it’s ready to be released. Sure, there will be some bugs, but if Microsoft can get away with like a billion bugs, I think our initial launch can get away with a couple as well.

• Launching Too Early
• Yeah. We’ll keep this in mind.

• Having No Specific User in Mind
• We know who our customers will be. And there will be plenty of them.

• Raising Too Little Money
• We just started, this is not really relevant right now. We have enough capital to start up.

• Spending Too Much
• Nope. We’re really conservative about this. No unnecessary expenses. We put all our money into R&D.

• Raising Too Much Money
• Nope.

• Poor Investor Management
• We’re the investors. I hope we can manage ourselves.

• Sacrificing Users to (Supposed) Profit
• No, both Alex and I are really customer-oriented. We’ll try to do our best to cater to our customers.

• Not Wanting to Get Your Hands Dirty
• Yeah, we admit it. Neither of us like to clean the toilet. Except for that, I don’t think there’s anything that we consider dirty. Alex is a programmer, I’m a business-guy with a background within computer-science. I think we have the field covered pretty well.

• Fights Between Founders
• Sure hope that’s not gonna happen. Alex’s been a good friend of mine for years, so I think I know him pretty well by now. We also share a similar vision regarding the future of the company.

• A Half-Hearted Effort
• Not so much.

Read the entire article at Paul Grahams’s homepage.

These last few days we have created a foundation for the work within our new company. Basically, we have configured and installed some internet related stuff. For now our ‘virtual base camp’ includes the following:

1. Eventum for project tracking. This lets us keep track of what needs to be done, when it has to been done, and who’s doing what. We’re going to apply this to software development and project development alike. It’s like our virtual whiteboard.
2. A Blogger account or two (or three) for this blog.
3. A Google Sitemap to make sure we can start staking out our claim in cyberspace.
4. Online document collaboration through Google Docs and Spreadsheets. This is pretty cool stuff, especially when working a lot online like we do.

Since we’re such a modern company we’ll probably be using many more online tools before we’re done.

It might be that a lot of ‘old school’ companies are still wondering how the heck these things work or why they’re even good. But I think some day people will be wondering how companies got by at all without this stuff.